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the automobile and especially the sports car has evolved past manual trannies

Yes, manuals are disappearing rapidly.  I figure my car has a great antitheft device.  We go to a nearby French restaurant a couple time a month and the Indian dude they have parking cars can't drive a manual.  He just waves me in when I show up in our GTI and grins.  He keeps saying he's going to learn.  Not on my car.

I suspect the torque converter will also disappear in 10 years or so.

Are there auto trannies without torque converters?

Are there auto trannies without torque converters?

Yes, both dual clutch and CVTs.

https://www.autonews.com/article/20151207/OEM06/312079988/once-promising-dual-clutch-transmissions-lose-favor-in-u-s

Some DCTs do have them to smooth transitions though.

https://www.nap.edu/read/21744/chapter/7#175

Automatics with flappy paddles approximate this if you want to shift manually.  And today this is faster and more fuel efficient usually.

I think that might be acceptable on a sports car, of course. Especially a "high-end" sports car measured more by lap times than smiles. I still like a clutch, but I realize it's not the optimal solution on a performance car which is designed to be optimal.

For non-performance cars, none yet have paddle shift that is any good, as far as I'm aware. 

I've tried it in manual mode several times, but my muscles want to treat it like a manual transmission.  My left foot goes for the nonexistent clutch pedal, and my right hand wants to stir the shifter like it's a 6-speed.  Because I have to actually think of what I need to do, it's not much fun.
I suppose that if I drove it all the time, I might get used to it.

I do foresee this with the quasi-manual shifting. Unless I'm going to use it constantly, it's not much use at all. 

My ex had this in her Volkswagen Passat years ago. The only time I ever used it was on a twisty mountain road, because it's one of those things that sometimes when you're in the middle of a corner you want to hold a gear even after coming off the throttle rather than the automatic up-shifting and then needing to down-shift once you get back on it. But it didn't feel "natural" to use it, because I didn't use it any other time.

That's obviously not the case if you use these systems constantly. And it's obviously not the case when you have a clutch and a gear lever, because you're forced to use it all the time.

But I think it would be hard to get used to, because I'd get lazy with it in daily-driving tasks and just drive in auto mode, and thus then wouldn't be prepared to use it when I was in "fun mode". 

I doubt many people pay any attention to the tach these days.

Another "fun" story about my ex... I had just returned from a business trip, and was going to a homebrew club meeting that night, and I get a frantic call from her that her car is overheating. Every time she got on the throttle, it would start to overheat, and then when she got off, it would stop...

...because she was looking at the tach. 

Life would have been a lot simpler if I'd just divorced her then...

A real woodie.